The fate of our corruption

Abstract

This special issue of Contributions to Indian Sociology began life as the best collaborative ventures do, as a conversation in a panel, this one for the 2012 South Asia Studies Conference at Wisconsin, Madison. The theme of the conference was corruption and the paper presenters on the panel sought to explore how corruption was constitutive of the everyday. We were, and remain, convinced that corruption is not just a structural blip in the social to be stamped out by greater surveillance and more effective policies. We maintain that there is something to the fact that even as so many of our interlocutors decry corruption for the suffering it imposes on their lives, they also feel that it is an obdurate element of the world, one with its own time and place. But our claims first call out for the need to specify what we mean by corruption. Rather than privilege the popular understanding of corruption as the abuse of power for personal benefit, we take more seriously the dictionary meaning of it as forms of debasement, a lowering from a state of excellence into depravity or the impairment of judgement and integrity.The reason for moving away from the more common understanding of corruption is because that understanding, increasingly prevalent in global discourses on governance and clearly important as a rhetorical device, leeches the word of its many nuances that may resonate with people's myriad experiences of it. In contrast, thinking of corruption as debasement draws our attention to prior or even desired states of excellence, the tumble from grace and the likelihood of us befalling such fates. The

Lost worlds

“…In a recent introduction on corruption, NaveedaKhan (2015) explores the experience of corruption as emblematic of civilisational decline or social decay. Drawing from Stanley Cavell's reading of Spengler and Wittgenstein, she reflects on the rise and decline of cultures as being placed less in history in the sense of human/world history and more natural history as biological/organic.…”